Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality (7 page)

“Are homosexuals to be excluded from the community of faith?” asked one gay Christian in a letter to a friend. “Certainly
not,” he concluded. “But anyone who joins such a community should know that it is a place of transformation, of discipline, of learning, and not merely a place to be comforted or indulged.”
¹¹
Engaging with God and entering the transformative life of the church does not mean we get a kind of “free pass,” an unconditional love that leaves us where we are. Instead, we get a fiercely demanding love, a divine love that will never let us escape from its purifying, renovating, and ultimately healing grip.

And this means that our pain—the pain of having our deeply ingrained inclinations and desires blocked and confronted by God’s demand for purity in the gospel—far from being a sign of our
failure
to live the life God wants, may actually be the mark of our
faithfulness
. We groan in frustration
because
of our fidelity to the gospel’s call. And though we may miss out in the short run on lives of personal fulfillment and sexual satisfaction, in the long run the cruelest thing that God could do would be to leave us alone with our desires, to spare us the affliction of his refining care.

“Not only does God in Christ take people as they are: He takes them in order to transform them into what He wants them to be,” writes historian Andrew Walls.
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In light of this, is it any surprise that we homosexual Christians must experience such a transformation along with the rest of the community of faith?

The Christian story proclaims that our bodies belong to God and have become members of the corporate, communal body of Christ. This is yet a third reason Scripture and the church’s no to homosexual practice make sense to me.

From the first page of Genesis, the Bible rings with the truth that we are, before anything else,
creatures
. The prophet Jeremiah
and Paul after him both used the metaphor of a potter and clay: God is the master artist, and we are his earthenware vessels: “Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?” Paul asks rhetorically. “Will what is molded say to its molder, ‘Why have you made me like this?’ Has the potter no right over the clay…?” (Romans 9:20, 21).

The gospel proclaims that we belong to God twice over—first because he created us, and second because he has redeemed us through the work of his Son. “For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself,” states Paul epigrammatically. “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living” (Romans 14:7-9).

Though it sounds politically incorrect to modern ears, the gospel has always said that God may demand from us what he wants, since we do not belong to ourselves. Strictly speaking, we have no “inalienable rights.” God reserves all rights for himself. And this extends even to the realm of our sexuality—what we humans do with our bodies. “The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord,” Paul counseled the Corinthians, adding, “and the Lord [is] for the body” (1 Corinthians 6:13). “You are not your own,” he wrote, “for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (vv. 19-20).

But not only do our bodies belong to the Lord. In Paul’s estimation, they belong to one another as well: “For as in one [physical] body we have many members,…so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another” (Romans 12:4, 5). One would be hard-pressed to find a statement more drastically
opposed to our popular notions of personal autonomy and democratic independence. New Testament scholar Richard Hays writes:

Through baptism, Christians have entered a corporate whole whose health is at stake in the conduct of all its members. Sin is like an infection in the body; thus, moral action is not merely a matter of individual freedom and preference…The New Testament never considers sexual conduct a matter of purely private concern between consenting adults. According to Paul, everything that we do as Christians, including our sexual practices, affects the whole body of Christ.
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From the gospel’s point of view, then, there is no absolute right or unconditional guarantee of sexual fulfillment for Christian believers. And this is one more reason the Bible and the church’s prohibitions of homoeroticism have seemed less and less surprising or arbitrary or unfair the more I’ve thought about them within the context of the gospel. If
all
Christians must surrender their bodies to God in Christ whenever they enter the fellowship of Christ’s body, then it should come as no great shock that God might actually make demands of those Christians and their bodies—demands proving that God, and God alone, has authority over us.

Fourth, and finally, the Christian story commends long-suffering endurance as a participation in the sufferings of Christ. In light of this, my objection that abstaining from homosexual sex will be too difficult doesn’t seem as strong or compelling as it once did.

While taking a German class in college, I learned that in some old Teutonic and Scandinavian religions and mythologies there is
an ideal of the “fated warrior.” This is the champion who heads into battle fully aware that doom awaits him at the end. “Defeat rather than victory is the mark of the true hero; the warrior goes out to meet his inevitable fate with open eyes.”
¹⁴

Since making this discovery, I have thought often that this idealized picture resonates profoundly with the Christian story. One of the hardest-to-swallow, most countercultural, counterintuitive implications of the gospel is that bearing up under a difficult burden with patient perseverance is a
good
thing. The gospel actually advocates this kind of endurance as a daily “dying” for and with Jesus. While those in the grip of Christ’s love will never experience
ultimate
defeat, there is a profound sense in which we must face our struggles now knowing there may be no real relief this side of God’s new creation. We may wrestle with a particular weakness all our lives. But the call remains:
Go into battle
. “There is much virtue in bearing up under a long, hard struggle,” a friend of mine once told me, even if there is no apparent “victory” in the short run.

“Learning to weep, learning to keep vigil, learning to wait for the dawn. Perhaps this is what it means to be human,” someone has mused.
¹⁵
Significantly, this kind of long-suffering endurance is not a special assignment the gospel only gives to gay and lesbian persons. Many believers of all stripes and backgrounds struggle with desires of various sorts that they must deny in order to remain faithful to the gospel’s demands. Homosexual Christians who choose to remain celibate “must face the dilemma of a life without sexual fulfillment,” wrote Francis Schaeffer in a letter to a friend. “We may cry with them concerning this, but we must not let the self-pity get too deep, because the unmarried girl who has strong sexual desires, and no one asks her to marry, has the same problem. In both cases
this is surely a part of the abnormality of the fallen world.”
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Schaef-fer’s language and outlook may be a bit old-fashioned, but his point is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the gospel.

Once, when I was at a low point in my struggle with my homosexuality, I wrote to an older single friend. “How can I go on living with this frustration?” I asked, feeling desperate. My friend wrote back:

Your email speaks in some detail about the desire for marriage and intimacy. To not experience this relationship means living with unfulfilled desire. But I assure you, even if you have to live your whole life without the blessings of marriage and family, you are not alone. Many, many people are (and have been) in the same boat. I am forty-one years old, a virgin, and one who has NEVER experienced physical intimacy with another woman or man. Do long for it? Sure. But God’s grace is fully sufficient to accomplish his purposes in me. Furthermore, I’d suggest that living with unfulfilled desires is not the exception of the human experience but the rule. Even most of those who are married are, as Thoreau once said, “living lives of quiet regret.” Maybe they married the wrong person or have the pain of suffering within marriage or feel trapped in their situations and are unable to fulfill a higher sense of calling. The list of unfulfilled desires goes on and on.

My friend went on to say that the gospel does not necessarily promise a rescue out of the pain of living with homosexual desires. Instead, it is a message about God’s strange working in and through that pain—God’s “alchemy of redemption,” as Philip Yancey calls it.
¹⁷
“My power is made perfect
in
”—not in
the absence of, but
in the midst of
—“
weakness
,” the Lord said to Paul (2 Corinthians 12:9, italics added).

One of the ways I have received help in dealing with my particular struggle has been through reading about the unfulfilled desires of others and how they have dealt with them. Schaeffer mentioned the many heterosexuals who would like to marry but for whatever reason cannot find the right partner. Persons in that situation, if they are Christians, must struggle to subordinate their desires for sex to the gospel’s demands for purity. They must choose, again and again, to forgo sexual fulfillment. And there are many others in similar situations.

At a time in my life when I was wrestling earnestly with self-denial, a friend of mine who knows my struggle well handed me a copy of Wendell Berry’s novel
Jayber Crow
.
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In it Berry tells the story of a gentle barber who sets up shop in the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, during the Great Depression years. Soon after arriving, he catches the eye of a girl named Mattie Keith, several years his junior. “The brief, laughing look that she gave me made me feel extraordinarily seen, as if after that I might be visible in the dark,” Jayber wistfully recalls.
¹⁹

Years after this initial encounter, Mattie ends up marrying Troy Chatham, a worthless loafer who, as the novel progresses, dismantles bit by bit the beauty and delicate balance of the rich farmland he inherits from Mattie’s folks. As Mattie’s admiration for her husband gradually unravels, Jayber finds that his admiration for her has blossomed into love. It hit him with the force of revelation one day out of the blue.

“For a long time I did not know what to make of it,” Jayber says later of the experience. “What business had an ineligible
bachelor to be in love with a married woman?” Toward the end of the novel, Jayber weighs his options, tormented by the conflict between his feelings for Mattie and his honor and integrity. He cannot declare his affections, he decides. Rather, one day as he stands in the middle of the Kentucky woods he is so fond of, in a strange, solitary ceremony, he makes a vow, before God, that he will love and cherish Mattie as he would his wife, if he had one.

From time to time, he questioned his decision. “Is it
legal
to be married to somebody who is not married to you?” a voice in his head asked.

I said, “I guess it’s legal to be married to any number of people as long as they don’t know it.”

“But there’s not any comfort in that.”

“No,” I said. “No comfort.” But I had to laugh.

I had not, you see, arrived at any place of rest. Maybe I had not solved a single problem or come any nearer to the peace which passeth all understanding. But I was changed.
²⁰

Jayber mused, “Sometimes I knew in all my mind and heart why I had done what I had done, and I welcomed the sacrifice. But there were times too when I lived in a desert and felt no joy and saw no hope and could not remember my old feelings. Then I lived by faith alone, faith without hope.”
²¹

This was the price of faithfulness for Jayber Crow. He willingly accepted the pain of living without Mattie for the sake of a higher commitment. He chose not to tell Mattie of his love, not to sleep with her, in the slim confidence that such fidelity would one day make sense and be repaid somehow. The connections of Jayber’s struggle to mine as a homosexual Christian are not hard to see.

Stories of imperfect faithfulness and perseverance like this one inspire me and give me hope. I am not alone as a homosexual Christian. I am not the only one who has chosen voluntarily to say no to impulses I believe are out of step with God’s desires.

“If anyone would come after me,” Jesus said, “let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). With these words, Jesus issued the marching orders everyone who chooses to become a Christian must accept. Suffering like Jayber Crow’s in his desire for a married woman or mine with my same-sex attraction—all of it, seen from the vantage point of faith, is obedience to Jesus’ call for us to join him in his dying and self-denial.

The sorrow and suffering we experience as homosexual Christians is that of saying good-bye to any sure hope of satisfying our sexual cravings. In choosing fidelity to the gospel, we agree to bear up under this burden for as long as is necessary.

The Christian story proclaims that all the demands of Scripture are ultimately summons, calls, invitations—beckoning us to experience true, beautiful, and good humanness.

C. S. Lewis once faced the question: Won’t pursuing Christian holiness make me naive, less worldly-wise, less experienced? If I follow the dictates of the gospel, I’ll become a sheltered, backwoods bumpkin, unaware of and irrelevant to real human experience! To this objection, Lewis wrote:

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is…A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense
know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in…Christ, because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.
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